


Contents Under Pressure

by Tozette



Series: Hinata at Hogwarts [3]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Harry Potter Setting, Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, Hinata's anxiety is the fourth major character in this, Lovecraftian Themes, M/M, complicated family relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-03
Updated: 2019-05-03
Packaged: 2020-02-16 13:20:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18692293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tozette/pseuds/Tozette
Summary: Hidan and Kakuzu try to make a friend. They're not amazing at it.(“I’msofucking nice,” Hidan muttered.)





	Contents Under Pressure

**Author's Note:**

> Hidan swears a lot, Hinata is a deeply anxious person, neither Kakuzu nor Hidan _nor Hinata_ knows how to make friends, and I don't know anything about astronomy. I think that's it for warnings! 
> 
> General notes: I think I started writing this a little before finishing the first one, so there might be some mild timeline confusion... how about we just roll with that and don't think about it too hard? ;)

Detention was always boring. That, Hidan figured, was the point -- they made you waste your time doing pointless boring shit and you were supposed to feel like that was because of something you’d done, instead of something _they_ did to _you_. This didn't make a whole heap of sense to Hidan, but that was how Hogwarts was. They said they were going to teach critical thinking skills, but the school still operated under the assumption that its students should never be allowed to think: ‘Hey, maybe the people punishing me for walking around in the woods are actually... _wrong_...'  
  
Hidan was what he called a free thinker, and what his teachers called a menace to public order. It was all about perspective.  
  
Having said all that, it was less boring than Hidan had expected.  
  
Hyuuga Hinata was weird, but ...maybe okay? They’d used her to get the unicorn hair they needed, of course, and she’d seemed like -- well, she sure didn’t seem to think much of Kakuzu and him then. But she’d been okay just now, hadn’t she?  
  
She couldn't talk properly and she got worked up at strange, apparently random intervals. But she didn't mind at all when he told her about the outer gods. Even Kakuzu hated it when he talked about the outer gods, and Kakuzu was the least squeamish person he knew. But Hyuuga even asked for clarification in places, so he knew she was listening. Tonight's was probably the most peaceful conversation Hidan had had this school year, and -- well. It was the end of spring by now.  
  
"I'll be seeing you," he said to her at the end, when their basket was full and they emerged from the forest and into the glow of the pale moon over open grass. It seemed bright after the dimness under the trees.  
  
Hyuuga shot a wide-eyed look at him over her shoulder in the nocturnal half light. After a second she managed an uncertain smile in his direction.  
  
Like he said: she was friendly. _Not_ necessarily a good thing -- for her. For him it was fine.  
  
He smiled back, and watched her flinch. His smile widened.  
  
She scampered off, a little too fast to be polite about it, across the damp grass, away toward the huge dark silhouette of the castle.  
  
Hidan dawdled on the way back, leaning his weight back on his hips and giving in to the deep internal compulsion to look up at the stars and the moon. This far from any muggle city, the stars gleamed overhead, clear and bright.  
  
The constellations weren't quite right. The light of dead stars still hit them here on Earth years and years after the fact. Nobody else could seem to tell the difference, and the scattering of stars above never matched the ones burning and wheeling in Hidan's mind's eye. No wonder they were teaching the students _sweet fuck all_ in astronomy.  
  
He waited for Kakuzu once he got to the steps, flouting curfew to lean against one of the castle walls next to a suit of armour. It turned its faceless helm toward him with a skreee of scraping metal.  
  
He ignored it.  
  
Kakuzu showed up ten minutes later, which was just long enough for Hidan to start feeling restless about the stars he could see above. He could try to change them. He could try to -- to... hurry them along, a bit. Parts of him had definite ideas about what the sky should look like. It was practically a map inside his head.  
  
"Finally," he whined, when he heard Kakuzu's distinctive footsteps. For a big, heavy guy, Kakuzu moved fast and light. Hidan’s eyes, finally drawn back from mapping light and distance in the sky, threw him into strange focus. He looked misshapen, some parts bigger than others, eyeless. Hidan breathed and for a second everything reeked of seawater and sulfur and old fish.  
  
He exhaled noisily and gave an exaggerated stretch. Another breath. His lungs moved, his ribs expanded. Nope, just Kakuzu after all.  
  
"What the hell, Kakuzu, did you get lost?"  
  
"It takes time to spot the plants in the dark. And since I was with a teacher, I didn't get to slack off."  
  
Hidan clicked his tongue disgustedly.  
  
Kakuzu took him by the back of the neck with one huge cold hand and shoved him toward the entry. "Come on."  
  
Hidan rolled his neck into the firm grip, feeling the resistance of Kakuzu’s strong hand and calloused fingers. He didn’t shake him off. He let himself be led. The stars spun and wheeled and danced enticingly above him, humming a discordant melody only he could hear. He ignored them.  
  
“Your dorm?” Hidan prompted. He knew what Kakuzu would say, but he spoke to drown out other sounds. There was a cut on Kakuzu’s thumb. Its dry edges scraped his neck. He felt like he could feel every cell, feel the old injury thumping in time with his pulse, warm and alive.  
  
“No,” said Kakuzu. Hidan took him at his word; they turned toward the kitchens instead of the dungeons.  
  
The students in the Hufflepuff common room went quiet when they came in, looking up from their games of exploding snap and gobstones -- why did _anybody_ play gobstones, seriously, Hidan hated the stupid stinking shit they squirted -- but saying nothing directly.  
  
Most of his housemates, Hidan figured, were pretty used to seeing Kakuzu by now. The occasional mutters that _we shouldn’t be letting Slytherin students into our common room!_ usually went ignored. If Hidan’s Head of House was concerned, he had yet to hear about it.  
  
(...and to be fair, if he’d heard about it, he’d probably have ignored it. Hidan was like this.)  
  
Hidan ignored the looks and the occasional quiet, annoyed comment. He was still thinking about their detention. Peripherally, at least. Mostly Hyuuga.  
  
She was... She did that weird thing when she spoke, which was frustrating. Listening to Hyuuga try to talk tonight was harder than he remembered: the English language being reliably linear, he couldn't hear to the next noise until she'd expressed the one that came before it, but sometimes she ... stopped and hovered on that one first, and it took forever to get the full sentence out.  
  
Listening to her weird efforts to talk tonight put him in mind of an idling train, stuck between stations, getting nobody anywhere. He'd met people -- well, things, anyway -- who didn't do linear speech. They found him just as annoying as he found her, probably.  
  
"You like her," Kakuzu said, once he was on Hidan’s bed. His shoes were kicked off but his uniform remained otherwise pristine, tie tied, shirt neat. Hidan had shed half of his clothing on the way from the door to his bed. He left it there.  
  
The room was dim. From outside the window, a streak of moonlight threw everything into monochrome shadows and grey-silver highlights.  
  
Hidan didn't even bother asking who he meant, or what he was talking about. "Hyuuga? She's... nice." Nice was probably underselling it a bit. Hyuuga was _unsettlingly nice_.  
  
"She is," Kakuzu agreed, "but lots of people are nice. You don't like them."  
  
To say Hidan _disliked_ a lot of people was to accuse him of noticing them in their capacity as people at all, which was simply not accurate -- but him _liking_ someone was even rarer.  
  
"Aa.” Kakuzu was right. There were multiple reasons, none of which were good ones to share with him. “I can like people, I’m a great guy like that. Ne, Kakuzu -- are you _jealous_?" Hidan wondered.  
  
He didn't sound jealous, but his interest was hard to place otherwise.  
  
There was a pause of the kind that sometimes occurred when Kakuzu felt he couldn’t process a thing that was as dumb as what had come out of Hidan’s mouth. It was a very specific pause. It was a pause with which Hidan was intimately familiar.  
  
“As usual," said Kakuzu after a few lingering seconds of this intensely judgemental silence, “you put too high a value on yourself.”  
  
Hidan twitched at the implication that he wasn’t worth Kakuzu’s jealousy because, firstly, he definitely _was_ , and, secondly -- _secondly_ , “Fuck you, Kakuzu,” he whined, and jabbed him in the ribs.  
  
The jab was intended more to hurt than to really damage, but Kakuzu’s fingers snapped closed around his wrist before he made contact anyway. He twisted, and did not stop or let go until Hidan gave in and flinched for him.  
  
The dorm door creaked open while Hidan was gathering himself for retaliation, and they both paused to look toward it. A stream of warm light from the corridor fell over the stones and left a golden streak across one corner of Hidan’s bed.  
  
There was a soft crunching noise, a _cromch cromch cromch_ , and then a big, heavyset teen threw his huge shadow on the wall. He came in trailing potato crisp crumbs, and he stopped after three steps inside to look right at Hidan and Kakuzu where they were sprawled on Hidan’s bed in the dark.  
  
They stared back.  
  
There was a silence.  
  
“Akimichi...” said Kakuzu slowly.  
  
_Cromch_ , went a potato crisp, right into his mouth while he stared at them. His eyes seemed very blank.  
  
“The fuck are you looking at?” Hidan barked.  
  
He didn’t answer.  
  
He didn’t seem to be moving, either, and for a hot irrational second Hidan fantasized about launching off the bed and going for his throat. He could feel his body tensing to do just that, and Kakuzu must have felt it too because he leaned subtly out of the way.  
  
At length, however, the boy grunted to them and turned to climb into his own bed.  
  
Hidan sighed out noisily and flopped back on the covers.  
  
Akimichi shuffled around but the sounds cut off when he spelled the hangings of his bed shut. Kakuzu waved one hand at the open door, sending it creaking back closed again, and then the noises drifting from the common room also fell silent.  
  
“Whatever. What’s your interest, then?” Hidan said then. From his supine sprawl, he put one foot up against his bed post. His bare foot looked very pale against the dark wood.  
  
“Her family’s old money,” Kakuzu said bluntly.  
  
Hidan heaved another huge noisy sigh. He didn’t know why he hadn’t seen that coming. “You and money,” he muttered.  
  
“You want to be on the street this summer?” Kakuzu growled.  
  
Hidan made a disgusted noise in the back of his throat. No, of course he didn’t -- but it was possible to take a thing too far.  
  
Kakuzu lacked perspective. The old gods did not care about material things -- and they would come here, eventually.  
  
He cut that thought off with the ease of practice, ignoring the insistent voices whispering to him. _Go to the ocean_ , they told him, _wade out to your knees_ , echoing in his skull, _look up at the stars._  
  
So innocuous. So easy to do this one small thing for them. Easy to give in.  
  
And then there’d be another.  
  
And another.  
  
Tiny, baby steps...  
  
He scratched his head, and closed his eyes against the impossible angles making themselves known in the fall of the bed hangings and the drape of the covers. “Whatever. Plenty of people are rich. Is that all?”  
  
Kakuzu scoffed. “How many of those people will put up with you for two hours?” he said drily. And, hidden quietly in that question: how many of them would Hidan put up with?  
  
“Me?” Hidan jerked his head up. His eyes fixed on Kakuzu’s face, past all the white noise of mumbling acolytes and -- fucking _flutes_. Hidan hated flute music. “Me?”  
  
“You,” Kakuzu said, with -- his voice was too flat for humour, but there was the suggestion of irony under the hard regular tone. “Yes. You should try not to alienate her.”  
  
“Because _you’re_ so fucking personable?” Hidan snapped. Kakuzu didn’t deign to respond, so Hidan hit him again, -- sharp and fast and well-planned, this time. Kakuzu didn’t catch him. “Fuck off.”  
  
Kakuzu grunted at the impact. “Just don’t screw it up,” he growled.  
  
Hidan hissed through his teeth. Somewhere a flute was still droning, piping, endless and a little like a drill bit to the head. “Fuck off,” he repeated eloquently, shuddering.  
  
Kakuzu didn’t respond to him.  
  
“I’m nice,” he hissed in the dark, hours later. Kakuzu grunted, still awake. He rarely slept.  
  
“Then it’ll be no problem,” Kakuzu ground out from between his teeth. His voice sounded like something dredged up from the bottom of the ocean. Deep, thick, lightless --  
  
Now Hidan was thinking about the ocean again.  
  
“I’m _so_ fucking nice,” he muttered.  


* * *

  
  
The letter from Hinata’s father arrived on the Saturday a week following, a full seven days after her brief adventure in the Forest, and five following her strange detention. It must, she knew, reflect when Hiashi had found the time to write -- on such an onerous topic, anyway. Hanabi had received several letters. She’d seen them come in, dropped by stately eagle owls at the furthest end of the Ravenclaw table.  
  
The same eagle owl swooped in amid the morning rush of them and an envelope hit the wooden table next to Hinata’s pumpkin juice.  
  
The crest that had seemed so clear to her from all the way across the room was still clear to her when it was inches from her face.  
  
She pushed her plate toward the eagle owl, who snapped up pieces of her breakfast before resettling his feathers and winging swiftly away.  
  
Hinata examined the envelope for -- too long, probably. She thought about excusing herself, about running off back to Gryffindor tower and opening it where nobody could see her face. But nobody was watching her anyway. Why would they be? She wasn’t sitting with anybody. And, in a way, wasn’t it  conceited to assume anybody would bother paying that much attention to her?  
  
Going back up to the tower would only make her feel worse as the anticipation wound tighter and tighter in her guts and in her chest.  
  
She pushed her thumbnail beneath the seal until the wax peeled back from the parchment with a soft crack, and opened it directly. It was short and to the point.  
  
He had been notified of her transgression. He was ashamed of her conduct. He expected to hear that she was comporting herself with the dignity expected of her in short order. There would, he trusted, be no further repetitions of this nonsense to trouble him at home.  
  
Regards, Hiashi.  
  
His script was formal, flowing. The ink was almost mechanically even.  
  
Well. That was...  
  
That was over now, Hinata thought, folding and refolding the letter, once, twice, smoothing the lines. She was fine. That had not been so bad. There was a fine trembling in her fingers and she fumbled the letter back into its thick parchment envelope.  
  
It had not been as terrible an event as she had worked it up to be in her own unreliable mind.  
  
She smoothed the folds all out, making sure the corners matched up exactly, and tucked it into the voluminous pocket of her robe and looked back at her breakfast. The eggs seemed unaccountably unappetising and the idea of pumpkin juice turned her stomach.  
  
Hinata had some homework to get through before Thursday, actually, which seemed distant but was, after all, only five days away. With half the school off at Hogsmeade she could hide out in the library in total silence and it wouldn’t matter what she -- well. Nobody would be there to interrupt or see or...  
  
She got up. She had not been eating with any of the other students and was not required to excuse herself.  
  
Hinata went back to the dorm -- empty, at ten on a Saturday morning -- and tucked the letter away in her trunk. She sat on the edge of her bed for a few long minutes, unable to quite stop thinking about it -- about the words in her father’s narrow and deliberate calligraphy. Shame. Indignity. Disappointment.  
  
“Not coming down to Hogsmeade?” someone asked, cheerful, upbeat, over the click of the dorm’s door. Footsteps.  
  
Hinata blinked at the interruption of her thoughts. She did not look away from the wall. Her eyes wouldn’t shift.  
  
“No,” she said. It would have been rude not to respond. She could not, for the life of her, identify the speaker. They sounded indistinct and curiously distant.  
  
“Ooh, lots of homework? Alright, then. Have a good Saturday!”  
  
The Hogsmeade group left at eleven. Was it eleven already?  
  
“Thank you,” she said, soft and mechanical, “you too.”  
  
The door shut again.  
  
If it was already as late as that then the students visiting Hogsmeade would be leaving, and Hinata should... Hinata should remember what class her homework was for. With a deep breath and a gargantuan exercise of will, Hinata got up and dug around for her astronomy text. Madara-sensei was... strict, to say the least, and if Hinata finished his homework early she’d have time to go over it several times.  
  
Astronomy was not her strength. Few subjects taught at Hogwarts were actually Hinata’s strength, but she struggled especially with some of them, and astronomy was one such a subject.  
  
She passed through the common room uncontested. The only inhabitants were the first and second years, and they had no interest in her. The great echoing hallways were empty when she poked her head out of the Gryffindor common room, everyone having gone down to the Great Hall to be escorted to the village, and she breathed a deep sigh of relief. The library was several floors and staircases away, but if the school was this empty she certainly did not mind the walk.  
  
She made it down two floors.  
  
“Hey!” bellowed a voice in the corridor just as Hinata relaxed into the soft murmuring hush of the portraits.  
  
She twitched, but kept going. After all, it seemed likely that whoever it was would be calling for someone else, not her, so she just hunched her shoulders a little and sped up --  
  
“Hyuuga!” came next.  
  
Hinata froze like a baby bird before an ashrwinder.  
  
Footsteps approached, too fast for casual walking. Before she could slow her thundering pulse and unfreeze herself, a heavy hand fell with its full weight upon her shoulder and reeled her right into Hidan’s big body for a startled second.  
  
Hinata inhaled and got a sudden mouthful of -- of the smell of hair, and of food smells from breakfast, and of something oddly like ocean salt. Briefly Hidan’s bulk passed between her and the window, throwing her into shadow.  
  
He radiated heat against her side.  
  
She didn’t move.  
  
A breath passed, and Hidan, having caught her, released her from beneath his arm.  
  
She breathed again.  
  
“What’re you doing up here, anyway? Come on, Hogsmeade’s in the other direction.”  
  
“I -- er, that is --” said Hinata, stumblingly. A new body came between her and the window and she looked up to find herself in Kakuzu’s shadow. He was tall. It was a long shadow.  
  
“Astronomy,” he said, nodding at her text book, surprisingly observant. His voice was muffled by the thick Slytherin scarf across his mouth. “Hidan’s good at astronomy.”  
  
“Yeah, I am,” Hidan agreed, shamelessly, “It’s important, like, religiously. But I’m not skipping Hogsmeade weekend to help. Get moving, Hyuuga, we’ve gotta get there _before_ the Hog’s Head opens properly.”  
  
“Hidan,” said Kakuzu, a word with a world of information in it, none of which Hinata was quite able to understand.  
  
Hidan paused, made a face, and then shot a look at Kakuzu over her shoulder and added, casually, “But I guess I’m free this evening if you really need help or something.”  
  
That was -- confusing.  
  
Hinata hesitated.  
  
The idea that Hidan might be good at astronomy wasn’t actually the strange part if she thought about it. She could understand why Hidan’s.... religious convictions... might require an in-depth knowledge of astronomy, and he clearly took his gods (she used the term loosely) very seriously. And... she actually really could use some help. Someone to point her in the right direction, at least. But. _But_.  
  
“No, thank you,” she said in a voice that shook. She was relieved when it all came out sounding clear even though her bones were shaking with the terror of actually telling them -- or indeed pretty much anybody -- ‘no’.  
  
“Hmm,” said Kakuzu, eyes narrowing minutely, like she had done something unexpected and interesting and thereby attracted his terrible attention.  
  
Hidan’s facial expression was harder to read, but there was a definite unpleasantness in the way he suddenly stiffened.  
  
“Ah... that is, I would prefer...” Hinata bit her lip. “I would prefer not to go to Hogsmeade,” she got out, stumbling shamefully over the ‘s’ in ‘Hogsmeade’. Her heart rabbitted along in her chest.  
  
She could _feel_ the look Hidan exchanged with Kakuzu over her head this time.  
  
“That’s fine, I guess,” Hidan said slowly, when his attention fell back on her. “Though I can’t say I get why you’d rather do homework,” he added, curling his lip.  
  
She was at a loss.  
  
“I... don’t...” Hinata began, but Kakuzu snagged his arm and interrupted:  
  
“He means we’ll see you later.”  
  
“Right, right,” Hidan said, sounding distracted. “You, uh, enjoy your studying or whatever.”  
  
He waved at her during their retreat, and then somehow Hinata found herself all alone in the corridor, feeling the cold light from the window on her skin again, accompanied by nothing more than her own nerves and unsteady heartbeat.  
  
Well.  
  
At least _that_ was over, she thought. They’d said ‘see you later’, but that just meant ‘goodbye’, really. She had told them she didn’t want to go with them, and they’d accepted that.  
  
That would be the end of it, she was sure. She wasn’t that interesting to anybody else, so why would she be that interesting to them?  
  
Yes. Right.  
  
So Hinata hunched into herself and crept to the library, as planned, and got absolutely nothing done -- not planned, of course, but still not entirely unexpected.  
  
She spent six hours in the library and managed to take about eight inches of notes.  
  
She did try, of course. It was not for lack of trying. It was just that, whenever she lifted her quill from the parchment, well, her attention drifted back to the letter from her father -- or back to the detention, or worse, to the strange unquiet dreams she’d had after it. And then she’d blink and and ten more minutes would disappear and she would suddenly be looking at a new blot on her parchment, her shamefully poor penmanship, and half-coherent notes on a topic she couldn’t recall.  
  
She zoned out completely at noon and twitched back to herself an hour later to see, in her own hand, an equation she did not understand -- she took arithmancy and she did not even recognise some of those symbols -- and the phrase _Nyarlathotep opens the door_ and decided that, firstly, she did not want to know who or what Nyarlathotep was or which door this was; and, secondly, she was staying away from any further texts concerning Hidan’s obscene religion. Understanding it wasn’t worth the bad dreams. Or... whatever _this_ was.  
  
None of this helped her studies, however, and as the light outside began to turn red and dim and golden, she despaired a little at how much she had not gotten done.  
  
And then Hinata’s day went from mildly nerve wracking and unproductive to completely dismal about an hour later, when Hidan showed up in the library. Under the disapproving gaze of the librarian, he scoped out the study areas and then stomped over and hurled himself into the seat next to Hinata.  
  
She flinched and looked up, wild-eyed. Hidan took this in stride.  
  
Perhaps a lot of people flinched at him.  
  
“So you’re shitty at astronomy, all right. Let’s take a look,” Hidan said, like he was in some way expected, invited, or even wanted.  
  
Hidan hadn’t turned out as terrifying as she’d been expecting, in the scheme of things, but he wasn’t the sort of person with whom she ought to be associating herself. _Comporting herself with dignity,_ she remembered. Her hands shook and she shoved them into her lap.  
  
He took her books, scraping them across the table to examine.  
  
“Um,” she said.  
  
Hinata had put the letter from her father away, but she still felt like it was with her, a heavy weight in her lap.  
  
She tucked one hand in her pocket. Nothing. Of course it was nothing -- a letter, on parchment, and such a short one at that, weighed next to nothing anyway. She wouldn’t have been able to feel its weight even if she’d _had it with her._  
  
But her pocket was empty.  
  
“I -- er -- you --” It was not even a stutter this time. Hinata just didn’t know what to say in response to Hidan showing up and stealing her book.  
  
“I’m s-sorry...?” she said, finally. Her S dragged. She couldn’t tell if it was noticeable to another person, but she could certainly hear it in her own voice. She got quieter in response. Maybe if she was quiet enough her meaning would come across without sounding all slurred and mangled. It wouldn’t, of course, but she could hope.  
  
“It’s fine,” said Hidan, with such nonchalance that Hinata was forced to assume that _not_ only had he not interpreted her soft protest as any kind of protest at all, but that he’d taken the words at their face value and assumed she was apologising for -- she glanced at the writing he was reading -- her... astronomy skills.  
  
She was, momentarily, a little bit offended that he thought he could help her with academic work. When she thought about it, her offence waned and she wondered if it was okay that she was conceited enough to think that just because Hidan didn’t know herbology was a real class it meant he wasn’t still better than her...  
  
Hunching nervously, Hinata looked around. The library wasn’t busy, but it wasn’t empty anymore either, having filled with students who’d gotten back from the village. It wasn’t like she was alone with him. And the librarian was watching him closely.  
  
“Excuse me.” She paused. Hesitated. Hidan grunted and didn’t look up from what he was reading of her work. “Sorry,” she added, feeling like it would be better to soften what she was saying with a pre-emptive apology, and feeling sincerely very sorry to say it at all, “but what... are you doing here?”  
  
Hidan was not even slightly offended -- presumably because he was completely oblivious to the context of her question. He looked up at her as though she was the one who’d misunderstood something. “Uh, astronomy?” he said, in a tone that read very much as: _like, duh?_ “What, you reckon you don’t need the help?”  
  
And he’d read her work by now, so of course his smile was an unpleasantly knowing one. She cringed in on herself.  
  
“I...” Well, yes, she did need help. But it didn’t automatically follow that she wanted help _delivered by Hidan_. Hidan was the kind of person who would engender, without even knowing it, exactly the kind of nonsense that had so disgusted Hiashi in his letter to Hinata that morning.  
  
Hidan wasn‘t paying the slightest bit of attention to her internal consternation.  
  
“So this is -- the two body problem, here, this is like, some bullshit mechanics thing, but in astronomy it’s usually about a moon around a planet, a planet around a star, or binary star orbit. Two separate things that only get affected by whatever shit each thing is doing, and nothing else. Right?”  
  
Hinata was distracted from her social dilemma of getting Hidan to leave her in respectable, if lonely, peace.  
  
She glanced at her text book. The top line on the page read: _spherically symmetric body affects external objects gravitationally as if all of its mass were concentrated at its centre_ , and she understood most of the words but still couldn’t make sense of them all together like that. She wasn’t even sure if that matched what Hidan was talking about.  
  
“Um,” she said.  
  
Hidan leaned his elbow on the table. He gave her a second, but he wasn’t very patient. “Hey. _Hey_. Hyuuga. Are you in there?”  
  
She twitched. His voice was loud in the relative quiet of the library, and several other students glanced at them.  
  
She cleared her throat. On the third try, she managed: “What does that have to do with...”  
  
Hidan jabbed a finger at her chart. “You’ve missed, like, two.”  
  
Had she?  
  
“I’m not figuring that out for you, you can fix that later,” he said breezily, and then flipped to the next page in the book and scrunched his nose up. “The next bit is just calculating centre of mass, I’m sure you can--”  
  
“Erm." Hinata felt like her face was on fire. She had the sudden urge to tell him she _wasn’t that stupid_ , but actually she had not, at all, understood the notes she’d made about the topic. And -- and since he was here, apparently determined to make a nuisance out of himself anyway -- he made it easy to give way to him. And give way she did, easily. She fixed her eyes on the text book. “I don’t...”  
  
He paused. He had turned the page partway, but now he stopped, squinted at her, said, “Huh," and then _slo-oo-owly_ tipped it back again. “...I guess we can go through that.”  
  
She saw his eyes flick toward the big clock in one corner of the library with its long old-fashioned pendulum swinging quietly away in its case, and then back to her.  
  
“This is gonna take a while, isn’t it,” he said, apparently to himself, but still... quite loudly.  
  
“I... Sorry,” said Hinata, again.  
  
“ _Mmmm_ ,” he said, low and thrumming and reasonably judgemental.  
  
She wasn’t sure if Hidan actually knew what he was talking about at all, but in the end they made it -- staggering, drunkenly -- through the chapter, and Hinata thought she’d understood what _Hidan_ was saying, even if she still wasn’t absolutely convinced that what he was saying was precisely what _the chapter_ was saying. There seemed to be some... odd inconsistencies.  
  
At the end he got up and stretched and his spine cracked four times, _pop pop pop pop,_ all in a sequence, and he made a deep noise in his throat of relief and pleasure. “I’m done,” he declared. “I don’t care if you’re not done,” he went on, “but _I’m_ fucking done.” And he flipped her book closed on her fingers.  
  
“Ah!" Hinata yelped, more in surprise than pain . “Um,” she said, also in what could probably be generously described as a yelp. Perhaps a squeak.  
  
What did you say about assistance that you weren’t sure you needed, and were definitely sure you shouldn’t accept, which showed up out of nowhere and bulled its way into your astronomy homework?  
  
“...Thank you.” You said thank you, or at least you did if you were Hinata.  
  
“Yeah, yeah, you’re welcome.” Hidan said, before he roughly kind of -- grabbed? patted? smacked? -- Hinata’s shoulder and then messed up her hair and kicked his chair back toward the table.  
  
“I’m _so_ fucking nice,” she heard him mutter darkly as he stalked out.  
  
She blinked.  
  
The library door banged behind him, and Hinata saw the librarian jerk out of her seat like a stepped-on cat, puffed up and hissing about points as she whirled toward the loud sound.  
  
In Hidan’s wake, she turned and glowered at Hinata instead. Hinata flinched, and ducked her head -- her hair was still a ruffled mess, she was sure, and, oh, her fingers had ink on them, how had she not even noticed that?  
  
She avoided the librarian’s gaze while she gathered her things frantically, shoving them in her bag and avoiding anybody’s eyes. She’d been sitting here with Hidan for ages. How many people must have seen? Who had they been? Had Neji seen? Had _Hanabi_ seen?  
  
She escaped the library and nobody questioned her or made any kind of comment on her company. But Hinata knew deep in her belly that this was _not_ ‘comporting herself with the dignity expected of her’.  


**Author's Note:**

> [ **me, laying on my face groaning like a downed pack animal:** *slowly reaches out one trembling hand and presses 'post without preview'*.]
> 
> anyway, if you feel like commenting and you liked something about this, please feel free to let me know. i always appreciate hearing what people liked.


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